Educational Narrative: Final Draft

Beep! Beep! Beep! Drats. It’s 4 am. And I have an English paper due in 5 hours. Okay, 10 more minutes.

Beep! Beep! Beep! I could get up now, but…no, I need 15 more minutes.

Beep! Beep! Beep! Okay, I really need to get up now, English paper due in T minus 4 and a half hours—minus showering, driving to school, and first period. I have about two hours. Now get out of this nice comfy bed, go down a few cups of yesterday’s coffee, and get to work. …Could this have been avoided? …Nah, this is not the time for a big epiphany that I need to change my life and blah, blah, blah—this is the time to analyze the diction and syntax of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But I just can’t seem to stop thinking about how wonderfully glorious it would be to go back to bed right now… Nope! I’ve put this off for weeks, I need to do this now. Let’s see, Huck Finn…this would’ve been so much easier had I actually read the whole book…

This right here is one of the many examples of the binds my procrastination got me into throughout high school. It would usually go something like this: I would get an assignment, put it off until the night before it was due, get sleepy, and then put it off even further, to the point where I was getting up at 4 am or skipping gym to write it in the locker room. If I would have just done my assignments in a timely fashion, I could have saved myself so much undue stress and sleep deprivation. Plus, it wasn’t like what I was doing instead of homework was so important; I wasn’t saving puppies from burning buildings, or building wells in Africa. No, I was either being lazy at home, or off doing something stupid or just unimportant.

Here’s the thing though, it wasn’t just my schoolwork that suffered due to my procrastination—it was also things that I care about. I stopped climbing, stopped meditating, stopped planning out trips I was going to take, stopped painting, stopped caring, stopped everything. I just stopped. I’ll do it tomorrow I told myself.

How did I get this lazy you ask? I guess it started a couple years ago, when I was in middle school. I had just moved to a small town in Oregon with my mom, I lived there for about five years. I went through some hard times in that little town. I just found it so much easier to put off all my problems and go do something else. Then it just snowballed and I found myself not only putting off problems at home, but also my schoolwork. My life just turned into a constant search for distractions.

So when did I finally realize that it was indeed time for a big epiphany that I needed to change my life? When I hit a low point in my life and counted up everything that my laziness had cost me. Among these casualties was the opportunity to go to a university because I couldn’t bring myself to work hard enough for scholarships or even apply for them. I missed out on a chance to go to Tanzania and teach because I couldn’t bother myself to fundraise. Going to Africa has been a dream near and dear to me since I was a kid and I let it pass me by out of sheer laziness. Eventually I had a giant cloud of guilt and worthlessness hanging over me and with every late assignment, every eye roll at a sloppy paper, it got bigger and bigger. It became utterly impossible to face.

But it was something I had to face, and I had to tell myself that I wasn’t unintelligent, I had the potential to do good things with my life, I was just letting laziness be a constant roadblock. After I had finally come to terms with my procrastination and how I was the only one responsible for what I had lost, I knew had to change my life. At first, it didn’t go so well. What do you think I did when I told myself I need to stop procrastinating? You guessed it. I said I’ll do it tomorrow. What is the harm of one more day of procrastinating? It’s only one day. It’s not only one day, it will turn into a lifetime if you let it.

But I had to start working hard eventually, and I did. I got a job, I enrolled in Olympic College, and got back into all the things I care about. It wasn’t easy because old habits die hard. When I’m having a hard time or I’m feeling overwhelmed, its instinct to go out and find something to distract me. But I just have to remind myself of my goals and all the things I care about.

I believe that procrastination is intellectual cancer. Think about it, if you were to spend four hours a day on something you cared about or enjoyed—let’s take drawing as an example. Can you imagine how good you would be at drawing after a year? That’s one thousand four hundred and sixty hours. Or if you spent a few hours a day doing research on a certain societal problem and blogging about it or something like it, you could inform a lot of people and get them involved. You could make a big change if you wanted to. But, statistically speaking, people spend between two and seven hours in front of the television or their respective technological devices. That’s around seven hundred and sixty to two thousand five hundred fifty-five hours a year. If everyone would do something that mattered in that time, we could get a lot done! As the wise Benjamin Franklin once said, “Don’t leave until tomorrow what you can do today.”